Does Stabroek News duck photographs of accused persons who are Indian?

I read with intrigue the intention of Stabroek News to picket the meeting of the Commonwealth Finance Ministers. This a brilliant way to highlight their ongoing battle with the Government about being unfairly punished using the withdrawal of state advertisements. Perhaps the newspaper should solicit the participation of other interest groups to join the picket in support of their cause. After all, an injustice for one is an injustice for all.

On the topic of fairness, I’d like to bring to Stabroek News attention a disturbing trend that I noticed with their newspaper. It would appear that the Stabroek News goes out of its way not to publish the photographs of criminally accused persons who are of Indian descent. On those rare occasions that they do, the picture is made unavailable to be opened or viewed by the paper’s online readers. If however, the Indian person is a crime victim, the image is allowed to be opened and seen online.

On the other hand, if the accused person is Afro Guyanese, it is almost a guarantee that their image would be published by the newspaper and made available to be viewed on-line. Initially, I thought these occurrences were coincidences, however, I am now unable to justify this obvious pattern and determine it to be a trending policy.

I call on the newspaper’s editor to correct this practice and perhaps offer an explanation

Yours faithfully,

Berkeley Van Bowen

Editor’s note

Mr Van Bowen is imagining things. We don’t manipulate information. If we have the photos we publish them and photos of many Indo-Guyanese accused have been carried. Just days before Mr Van Bowen’s letter we published photos of the Indo-Guyanese accused in the NBS fraud, for example.